However, all this, so far as personal danger is concerned, is of _small importance to the leading citizens_, because _they_—these leaders—will never lead or be led to war. They have nothing to fear from hissing bullet, burning fever, and the death-grip of devouring diseases in war. The plain, cheap wage-slave, the industrial draft-horses, the common men forced to keep books for a poor little salary, the fifteen-dollar-a-week clerks, the blistered miners, the tanned railroad men, the grease-stained machinists, the soil-stained farm toilers, these, all these and many others must learn one thing distinctly, and that thing is this: Modern human butchering machinery has been so highly developed, and disease in war is so hideous, that “our best citizens,” “our very _best_ people,” “our most successful men,” politely (and intelligently) decline all “glorious opportunities” to have their smooth fat bodies exposed to the steel-belching machines, or have their health ruined on the battlefield and in the “dead-house” called a military hospital. The common earth must not drink up their rich aristocratic blood; no rough army surgeon shall carve and slice and saw the “leading citizens” and carelessly toss their severed arms and legs into a bloody heap of flesh as a butcher tosses scraps and trimmings from steaks and chops from his cutting block. Why, _certainly_ not. It should be remembered that such people as bankers, big manufacturers, mine-owners, Senators, Congressmen, great editors and the like, do not have much physical exercise and at the same time they eat daintier food. They are not strong in muscle, except for golf, horseback riding, swimming, hunting trips, mountain climbing. They are softer in flesh than the wage-earner. They belong to the “very _best_ families,” and hence their flesh is finer, their “blue” blood is richer and more sacred than the wage-earner’s cheap red ooze. They are the social thoroughbreds, and the thoroughbreds believe that the thoroughbreds should be kept well out of danger, while just the common social draft-horses are rushed to the front where the modern butchering machinery is ready to mow down men by the thousands and befouling disease is ready to rot the unspilt blood. My working class brothers, mark it well: In the gilded, palatial homes of the industrial masters, in their club houses, in their elegant business offices, in the legislative halls where “statesmen” meet,—there the so-called best people, the still-fed, stall-fed snobs and Caesars of society never for one moment consider the matter of going themselves to the front, never for an instant plan to go themselves into the cyclones of lead and steel or into the death-grasp of disease in war. Never! To them the idea is so—well, so _unkind_—also ridiculous. Their minds are made up. They will not go.